The Merry Wives of Windsor – 1999

Director Mo Pearce

‘Come, gentlemen, I hope that we shall drink down all unkindness’

Amused by the larger than life character featured in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, there is a traditional story that Shakespeare was asked to write a play about Falstaff in love, by royal command. So we may have Queen Elizabeth I to thank for this enduring Tudor romp through the lanes and fields of Windsor. The play is a reflection of English country life and is unusual in the fact that most of his characters are ordinary folk; part of a new and growing middle class, wealthy and aspiring, but with solid peasant roots. Karl Marx found ‘on the first act alone more life and movement than in all German literature’!

Few serious critics have shared Marx’s view but the play has always been popular with audiences and has been the source of two well-known operas by Verdi and Vaughan Williams.

This may not be the same Falstaff as the earlier plays as he becomes the butt of others’ jokes rather than being the confident and eloquent perpetrator of his own. However, Dr Johnson believed that the play’s ‘general power is such that, perhaps, it never yet had a reader or spectator who did not think it too soon at an end’.

The plot creates the perfect recipe for a lively and entertaining evening. As a setting nothing could be more appropriate than the courtyard of ‘The George’. We hope, in this production, to capture the real spirit of the play for your delight, in what we trust will be a truly memorable experience.